Helping Trustpilot to Deliver an Exceptional Employee Experience

James Young
•
15-02-2018

Copenhagen’s Trustpilot is the world’s leading customer reviews platform. Its community of users help each other, and consumers worldwide, make informed decisions about which products to buy, and which companies to purchase from.

This passion for open and educated decision-making is ingrained in the culture at Trustpilot, which is why they chose Peakon to inform their people strategy, and improve employee experience within their organisation.

« You need to be a little bit brave in order to take in a tool like Peakon. You get to learn a lot of things that are fantastic about your employees and what they love, but you also know things that are not working out. »Sabina Notkin VP Tech Employee Experience

The importance of employee experience

“We’re a company that wants to make its employees happy,” says Sabina Notkin, VP Tech Employee Experience, “which means they need to have a good experience with us. If they don’t, they’re going to leave, and we don’t want them to leave.”

The importance of a great employee experience cannot be overstated. The concept itself is born from the understanding that an employee’s time at a company should be optimised, much like a “user journey”. This means a coherent experience from the first time they hear about the business, through to their final day. As Sabina points out, a poor experience leads to an increased risk of employee turnover.

Although the terms “employee experience” and “employee engagement” compete for prominence in many business journals, they are not opposing initiatives. A great employee experience is a means by which to improve employee engagement – and through improving engagement, you improve talent retention, performance and profitability.

Sabina and Trustpilot are a great example of an organisation that is taking the right approach to employee experience. You may think that its rise in popularity is a Silicon Valley fad, however, enterprises worldwide, both big and small, are dedicating key parts of their HR function to improving their employee journey.

Improving employee experience at Trustpilot

“One of the areas that we’re constantly a little bit lower on is the environment,” says Sabina. “We have an office here with too few meeting rooms – which is something we learned through Peakon – and too few areas where people can have informal chats.”

From the VP of Employee Experience through to Engineering Managers, Peakon provides everyone with high-quality insight on how their employees feel about their experience at the company. This covers a broad range of factors, from office environment to management support.

“In Trustpilot, we’re very data-driven… and Peakon has helped give a data-driven approach to people management,” says Martin Andersen, Engineering Manager. “Especially the historical scores – you can see if the graphs are going the wrong way or the right way… and see the differences between teams.”

Together, managers and HR at Trustpilot can make informed people decisions; decisions that they can be sure will have a positive impact on their employees. Feedback from Peakon influenced the design of the Trustpilot offices, and prompted an increase in the number of collaborative workspaces. This is not something you’d usually associate with HR, but clearly has a huge influence on how people are able to do their work.

“All the feedback we got from Peakon we compiled, and then we basically tried to create an office that is more optimised for the needs of our employees,” adds Sabina.

Experience, engagement, and Peakon

Through insights and transparency, Peakon helps to break down the siloed experiences that might exist within an organisation by providing a people-centric approach to feedback. Peakon promotes cohesion by helping businesses view their offerings through the eyes of their employees, much like Design Thinking helps designers consider a product or service through the eyes of a user.

“You need to be a little bit brave in order to take in a tool like Peakon,” says Sabina. “I think some organisations don’t want to know what’s not going ok, so it’s just a shout-out to everyone who’s using the tool. You get to learn a lot of things that are fantastic about your employees and what they love, but you also know things that are not working out. Once you have it, black and white, you have to do something about it.”

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Auteur

James Young

Part data scientist, part visualisation expert, and once cleaner of Didier Drogba's swimming pool - James takes Peakon's data and uses it to tell insightful stories.